The present invention relates to a flow direction controller disposed at the blow-out portion of an air conditioner and adapted to deflect the flow of air from the source to any desired direction.
An air conditioner having both air cooling and air heating functions preferably has a flow direction control adapted to direct the air downwardly in the heating mode and horizontally in the cooling mode, respectively, in order to establish a uniform temperature distribution in the room which is being air conditioned.
The user, however, may feel uncomfortable if the heated air downwardly discharged from the air conditioner in the heating mode impinges upon him at an excessively large rate. On the other hand, an experiment proves that a satisfactorily uniform temperature distribution can be attained by directing only a predetermined part of the discharged air downwardly while directing the other part horizontally. Thus, the air conditioner has been required to have a splitting function for the discharged air to direct a predetermined part of the air downwardly while directing the other horizontally, thereby to attain a good air temperature distribution without making the user uncomfortable.
To comply with this demand, U.S. Pat. No. 4,327,869 shows an arrangement in which, as shown in FIG. 1, the deflection of the discharged air over a wide area and the splitting of the air are conducted by varying the rotational position of a single deflector O. This known arrangement, however, involves the problem that the flow of discharged air encounters a considerably large flow resistance particularly when the deflector O is positioned to produce horizontal and downward flow components of the air.